Mercado y lavadero flamencos

Two painters made this picture, each doing what he did best. Joos de Momper laid in the wide landscape with its hazy violet distance, and Jan Brueghel the Elder, famous for his tiny precise figures, filled the foreground with a busy market and a river bank. The stretch on the right is a bleachfield. Around 1620 Flanders ran a serious linen trade, and long webs of cloth were spread flat on the grass and wetted again and again so the sun would slowly whiten them. It could take weeks. So the painting sets two rhythms next to each other, the bustle of buying and selling on one side and the patient, almost motionless work of bleaching on the other. The two men collaborated on many such scenes, dividing the labour between figures and setting.